BIA Scales and BF% - have they gotten better?

CoderGal

There are so many articles that say that BIA scales are inaccurate. Many of these articles seem to be based on old information once we figured out the fact BIA scales were inaccurate. So that's that. I had one years ago and it fluctuated like crazy. The most common reason I've seen is that body water fluctuates and BIA relies on an electrical charge and the resistance can change given more water or something of the like.

Fast forward to now and I've been using 2 in the past 2 years. If I stepped on it in may it would have given me a reading in the teens. And I had periods where I hardly had any water, had lots of water, exercised allot, exercised not at all...But it always gave me about the number I felt it should be.

Fast forward to now and I've been gaining Christmas weight for the past few months half meaning to and half not and not really knowing if it's a good idea. The Scales are reading consistently higher percentage (about 3% now), and I'm a few inches thicker in the middle....so it's what I'd expect.

One thing to note is my scale can also read the amount of water you have...so I'm not sure if the equations have changed over the years or they figured something out to make it more accurate? If I spent the next few days hopping on the scale wet dry naked snow suit bloated or not it will likely spit out the same number for BF%. I've even done a hand stand on it to see if it would gave me the same reading and it did.

I'm asking because well, the newer scales I have are definitely different from the ones I had before consistency wise. They also read body water. The ones I had before were all over the place including the recent one at the gym for that matter (a girl actually quit the gym because she got depressed she was so 'fat'...meanwhile she was ripped...it made no sense). The gym one was a hand held thing.

My BIA readings are making sense to me and so is my bfs...and my mom who is sedentary and significantly heavier have readings that seem to make sense to me. So what do you think? Do some BIA scales that read water better then others now? Do they work better for some people and not for others?

invisibubble

I have no idea, but I wanna know what scales you have, they sound consistent.

Sarauk2sf

The basic flaws still remain.


See the relevant section for an explanation as to why.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/830595-body-fat-estimation-methods

neverstray

Mine has all kinds of rules, which I imagine 99.999999% of people ignore. Things like, don't get on it after a shower. Don't get on it right after a workout. There's a list of about 10 or so things. I get on it in the morning after I pee. There's no rule against that. Mine is amazingly consistent. However, it's a little off from my caliper measurements. I take the lower of the two measurements. Lol. I thought about average them. Lol. J/k.

tameejean

I have a hand-held one as well as my scale, which also reads water, bone mass, etc. The body fat % is fairly consistent on both and they both give me pretty close to the same number.

watergallagher

My tanita bia scale says im15... sounds about right